Hitchens on Bernard Kouchner

When Christopher Hitchens isn’t debating religion, when he just sounds like a gadfly enfant terrible, he makes tremendous sense.  As is the case with so many Leftists who have embraced the War Against Jihadism, he has a good understanding of totalitarian mind think, and a healthy disdain for those Leftists still foolish enough to believe that capitalism is the ultimate enemy.  His witty and interesting tribute to Bernard Kouchner, France’s new foreign minister, is enjoyable and intelligent reading, right from the opening paragraphs, in which he takes aim at the coalition of the unwilling in the early days of the Iraq War:

During the early debates over the Iraq war, one was constantly being challenged to contrast the “unilateralism” of the Bush administration with the more mature and “European” approach of Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder and Vladimir Putin, the gleesome threesome who (along with the Chinese dictatorship) protected Saddam Hussein at the United Nations. What a difference a couple of years has made. Tony Blair may be stepping down as prime minister of the United Kingdom, but for the first time in a very long time, the heads of state in Paris and Berlin are both “Atlanticist” in their outlook. One might add that Chirac quit the Élysée Palace looking and sounding like a stroke victim who had long ceased to have anything relevant to say and that Schröder disgraced the German Social Democrats by barely waiting to leave office before signing up as a lobbyist for a Russian-based energy cartel. And is it necessary to add that Putin has revived the worst traditions of Great Russian chauvinism, crushing all domestic opposition at home while bullying Ukraine, Georgia, and most recently Estonia, and flaunting his connection to the ultra-reactionary Russian Orthodox Church. What a crew they were and are! The fourth member of the anti-Bush coalition of the willful, the cold-eyed Chinese post-Stalinists, are still engaged in a blood-for-oil scandal whereby Beijing provides the sinews of war to the genocidal regime that cleanses Darfur, while paying to buy most of Sudan’s petroleum.

The single best symbol of the change in France is the appointment of Bernard Kouchner to the post of foreign minister. Had the Socialist Party won the election, it is highly unlikely that such a distinguished socialist would ever have been allowed through the doors of the Quai d’Orsay. (Yes, comrades, history actually is dialectical and paradoxical.) In the present climate of the United States, a man like Kouchner would be regarded as a neoconservative. He was a prominent figure in the leftist rebellion of 1968, before breaking with some of his earlier illusions and opposing the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan—the true and original source of many of our woes in the Islamic world. The group he co-founded—Doctors Without Borders, or Médecins Sans Frontières—was a pioneer in the highly necessary proclamation that left politics should always be anti-totalitarian. (His former counterpart, Joschka Fischer of Germany, also took a version of this view before Schröder’s smirking Realpolitik became too much, and too popular in Germany, for him to withstand.)

Read, and enjoy, the rest here.

With news like Kouchner’s appointment, I continue my moratorium on saying anything mean-spirited about the French.  When faced with an internal crisis in the form of one big terrorist attack, the Spanish caved.  When faced with an internal crisis in the form of myriad small acts of terrorism (riots, car burnings, murderous anti-Semitic attacks), the French didn’t.  Kouchner seems to be part of that paradigm.